Zero and Beyond, India
Year: 2019-2020
Design Brief: Zero and Beyond is a coffee table book written by photographer Sushil Mishra based on his travels in Madhya Pradesh. The brief involved strategizing and designing the photo book.
Design Solution: This book was designed over the course of one year. We first strategize with the client how the book would flow, right from how many chapters, to how many pages each chapter would be. 32 cities were chosen from a very long list that would be covered in the book. These became the 32 different chapters in the book.
The whole book is divided based on time and how cities in Madhya Pradesh evolved right from 8th Century BC to modern age. Time and how it is calculated became the central theme of this book. Each city then was categorised based on the century it was created. The cities were further bifurcated into four types: historic, leisure, place of worship and forest/wildlife reserve. A customised icon system was designed for the book. Each city/place was illustrated with an icon.
Madhya Pradesh has two very important things that help it become a front runner in the idea of calculating time, one is the Tropic of Cancer pasesses through the state and second there is a Jantar Mantar (huge sun dials and other gadgets that were created to measure time). Hence we dedicated a spread to illustrated the story of Mahakal and its mythological relevance with the tropic of cancer and its association with time.
This has been a very interesting and challenging project. It has pushed us as Designers to constantly think outside the box and try our best to create a travel photo book which is unique and gives a different perspective to the reader.
Choice of fonts used for the book preserves the richness and elegance of all the stories of the cities the book talks about. Black, Gold and white was the colour pallet used to give justice to the beautiful and unique Indian culture and heritage.
As all photo books goes, the photos are the heroes of the book. As designers it is our responsibility to make sure we give them due justice and hence the design is minimalistic and subtle to bring all the elements together.
